1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electrical connector, and more particularly to an electrical connector having a spacer engaging with terminals which assembled to a housing of the electrical connector.
2. Description of Related Arts
Parallel ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) and parallel SCSI are two dominant hard disk (HD) interfaces technologies today. The parallel ATA disks are widely used in desktop PCs and portable PCs, and the parallel SCSI disks are mainly used in high-volume servers and subsystems. As disk interconnect speeds continue to rise, existing parallel ATA and parallel SCSI buses are reaching their performance limits because that parallel transmissions are susceptible to crosstalk across multiple streams of wide ribbon cable that adds line noise and can cause signal errors—a pitfall that has been remedied by slowing the signal, limiting cable length or both. Therefore, new interconnect technologies are needed to meet performance requirements going forward. The serial technology is emerging as a solution to the problem. The main advantage of serial technology is that while it does move data in a single point-to-point stream, it does so much faster than parallel technology because it is not tired to a particular clock speed.
Serial ATA (SATA) is a serial version of ATA, which is expected to be a replacement for parallel ATA. U.S. Pat. No. 6,331,122 discloses a type of SATA receptacle connector for being mounted on a printed circuit board. The receptacle connector has two receiving cavities defined in an insulative housing thereof and two sets of conductive terminals respectively used for power and signal transmission installed in the insulative housing. Another U.S. Pat. No. D469,407 discloses an electrical connector assembly with a SATA plug connector as a part thereof. The plug connector has two generally L-shaped tongue plates receiving two sets of terminals for electrically connecting the conductive terminals as the tongue plates are inserted into the respective receiving cavities of the receptacle connector.
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is a successor to the parallel SCSI and is also based on serial technology. Besides the advantage of higher speed signal transmission, another most significant advantage is the SAS interface will also be compatible with SATA drives. In other words, the SATA plug connector can plug directly into an SAS receptacle connector if supported in the system. By this way, the system builders are flexible to integrate either SAS or SATA devices and slash the costs associated with supporting two separate interfaces.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,497,709 issued to George discloses a kind of SAS receptacle connector which has generally the same configuration as the SATA receptacle connector. The SAS receptacle connector has two sets of terminals conformable with SATA signal provision in the receptacle connector. A third set of signal terminals is further arranged to a second side wall opposing to a first side wall where said two sets of terminals are arranged. Each terminal defines a planar portion having a mating portion exposed in the cavity and a vertical leg portion extending downwardly from the planar portion. For protecting the terminal, the receptacle connector further defines a spacer for fixing the lower end of the vertical leg portion of the terminal. However, the spacer limits the terminals in the transverse direction only but not in the vertical direction, therefore the planar portion of terminal may be broken when the connector is mounted to a print circuit board.
Hence, a new electrical connector is desired.